"The beast! It's back!"

Last week Ms. K warned me via text that there may or may not be some gargantuan beast lurking in the bedroom and it may or may not be there to deal with when I got home as she was off for work.

A beast?? That sound alarming. My logic oriented brain kicked in with some pertinent questions.

What did this beast look like?

Huge! Black!

Was it an animal or an insect?

An insect! A huge flying black insect! It came through the open window!

After some back and forth, I deduced that the offending insect may or may not have been a dragonfly. I'll admit that I kind of made fun of Ms. K for being such a girl. I mean a dragonfly? C'mon. Not something one gets into hysterics about.

When I got home, I tentatively entered the apartment, crept up to the bedroom door, opening it slowly as if it was reenacting the scene in Ghostbusters when Peter Venkman enters Dana Barrett's apartment to investigate whether or not there was a demon in her refrigerator.

Like the movie, I found evidence in the bedroom of a hasty departure. Her open laptop had been flung onto the bed, laying at a strange angle, and there were papers all over the floor. But what was absent was anything resembling a beast or even a dragonfly. With the window still open, I figured whatever flew in had managed to fly back out. Case closed.

Or was it?

On Sunday, as Ms. K and I prepared to leave the apartment and get dinner, I heard her shriek from behind me. "The beast! It's back!"

I looked up and saw something large flying around the bedroom, which for a moment looked like a bird. Except it was the largest dragonfly I've ever this side of a science fiction movie.

Holy shit!! Huge flying black insect! Flying around our bedroom! But this was no normal dragonfly. No, it was something straight out of the Jurassic Period. I swear to God that it was about 6 inches long (that's about 15 centimeters for those keeping score in metric).

What to do?

Ms. K and I, armed with rolled up magazines and pathetically swatted at it in between shrieks, which only made it fly around erratically. Our savior came in the form of an 80 lb golden retriever named Harley, who sensing our panic, went after the intruder and mauled it. Immobilized, I swept the giant dragonfly onto a magazine and tossed it out the window.

Phew! We were safe once more! I even apologized to Ms. K for having made fun of her. But what I didn't tell her was that two days later I saw four of that fucker's brothers flying around outside the bedroom window probably looking to avenge his death.

We've inadvertently started a dragonfly war. Good thing we're leaving the country!